North Carolina Miscellany
hints at the feelings Wendell wants to avoid confronting: “He needed to say something to Kevin and Yvonne. He told himself to stop thinking. He watched his hands on the wheel” (168). Despite the characters’ struggles, Makuck’s stories here are very often hopeful as the characters move away from rigidity and shift more toward realization of their own shortcomings and a desire to change. In his poem, “A Guide to Arrival,” Makuck provides an epigram from St. Catherine of Siena: “All the way to heaven is heaven.”2 This line reappears in Allegiance and Betrayal in the story “Family.” The idea that the process of living – even the difficulties along the way – is a blessing could describe Makuck’s characters throughout the collection as they navigate the most transitional parts of life.
Near Matter and the Distant Stars a review by Susan Laughter Meyers Kathy Ackerman. Coal River Road. Livingston, AL: Livingston Press, 2013. Beth Copeland. Transcendental Telemarketer. Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2012.
In an interview with Oxford American, Rebecca Lee’s explanation of epiphany could well describe what her characters and Makuck’s do: show characters who press on in their lives, sometimes with selfknowledge and sometimes not. Lee explains that “the story benefits from the struggle” of a character working through difficulties to arrive at a clearer knowledge of their own situation.3 Her characters’ poetic exploration of the world around them and Makuck’s characters’ hard-won truths highlight Edmundson’s idea of literature as a “soul-making” endeavor for readers. The short story genre continues to be revitalized by these two collections. n 2
Peter Makuck, Long Lens: New and Selected Poems (Rochester, NY: BOA, 2010) 177.
3
Liz Newborn, “Author Interview: Rebecca Lee,” Oxford American 1 July 2013: web.
Read more about reviewer Susan Laughter Meyers with her poems and a review of her recent poetry collection in the Flashbacks section of this issue.
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In their latest books, the poets Kathy Ackerman and Beth Copeland take entirely different approaches to getting from page one to the end of the collection. Their distinctly separate methods resemble those of two scientists: one using a microscope, the other a telescope, each to see what she needs to see. One sees the tiniest cells of near matter; the other, a huge landscape of distant stars. Whereas Ackerman keeps a tight hold on memories of her ancestral homeland in the not-too-distant West Virginia mountains, Copeland opens her dreamlike memories and visions to cultures around the world. The two separate visions result in differences in form and style – and, for the reader, a different set of pleasures. Kathy Ackerman is a poet enamored with place, family, and stories from the past. Coal River Road, her first full collection of poems (which includes numerous poems from her three chapbooks), is bent on preserving a heritage whose remnants are barely still present. The reader is drawn in by what seem to be autobiographical details and characters. Thus, it’s hard not to equate the “I” of the poems with the poet. Divided into three sections, the book turns initially to the poet’s childhood in the first section and part of the second, then to the present in the latter part of the second section, and finally to aging parents and family deaths. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole book is death-haunted. Ackerman documents one death after another as a way of holding on – to family, to what has come before, to a sense of continuity. To document is to remember, is to make the past more real.